Production support engagement is a discipline for supporting IT systems/applications which are currently being used by end users. In an enterprise, while executing production support engagement or production support service, a plurality of situations may arise. The situations may comprise of undesirable patterns or events arising due to changes in environment or existing policy decisions in any production support engagement. Further, the incidents may comprise but is not limited to increase in number of tickets raised, decrease in the number of team members, decommissioning or addition of an application or module. Thus, considering all these factors simultaneously for providing a smooth operation in day-to-day business activities is a challenge in the production support engagement.
The current technologies and methods for IT service operations management are reactive in nature. The current technologies provides dashboards from past data and problems are solved post they occur. What-If analysis capabilities of the current technologies are regressive and do not follow a systemic approach. Further, the current methods do not recognize the fact that situation handling by policy interventions could be of different kinds. Further, the decision support features provided by the existing tools and technologies includes dashboard generation, Key performance indicator (KPI) tracking, and tools and techniques for data analytics. Although, these tools facilitate decision making process through different features, but they are not capable of providing intelligence and optimization methods required to formulate policy decisions.
In the production support engagement, a policy, a pattern of behaviors, and an event are inter-related to each other. Different examples for pattern of behaviors may be increase in number of situations or incidents per month, change in the pattern of distribution of incidents, percentage of unresolved incidents using Known Error Database (KEDB), percentage of high priority situations or incidents, and oscillation in service level agreement (SLA) compliance. Further, the patterns of behavior can also be caused due to environmental triggers, and not necessarily by policies alone. If these patterns are not addressed properly, it may deter IT operations in the production support engagement. To handle such undesirable patterns, formulating policies in the production support engagement becomes a challenge.